Personal Evaluation

Group Evaluation

At the start of the project we were quite slow with myself on holiday but during this phase Dan and Danny built up some initial research, which did lead to our character design William Dyer. I would say we have very similar skill sets and this made it difficult for us split roles, I decided to get some early concept art out as this was very sparse. In reflection more concept art was probably needed especially in the environment as I found it difficult modelling the rooms later on, most of the time sending me back to the drawing board.

I developed moderately good modelling skills in Second Life as I designed the main chamber, the caves and scripted all the sounds and animations. The scripting was new to me however I did understand simple scripts, harder ones I took guidance from the Internet or the tutor. As far as textures went I really only used online textures and edited them to create a different pattern or make them seamless. I didn’t really make any textures from new for the environment; we were more original with character textures.

The building of the whole structure was quite difficult as I was new to Second Life and with the lack of concept art I didn’t really know where to start. Eventually it came together by making on the spot choices and also using others on the course to test the game. Playing it through myself also helped substantially in development. This enhanced my skills with placing objects like pillars in correct places to break line of sight with repeating textures and such things to make the rooms seem more unique.

As a fan of Maya after my animation course I used it a lot to convey concept art ideas and attempt to build objects and particularly William Dyers suit. I have a lot to learn with using NURBS as I found them very difficult to master and very different to polygons. The biggest thing I learnt was that you can use polygons in second life providing they are 32×31 and either a sphere or plane. From this module my Maya skills have definitely improved and I am starting to really enjoy using the program.

Another new feature I added in this brief was creating my own music, we did this in the college recording rooms and with Dan’s assistance we recorded alien whispers and guitar and drum loops. I then later composed everything together and integrated it into the game.

If we were to start from scratch I think I would be more organised with work and organisation of the group as I personally felt I did the most work and put the most effort in. A bit of leadership and correctly distributing jobs would sort this.
I enjoyed the project overall and learnt a lot of valuable skills. I would have liked to create a movie type machinema rather than walkthrough but we had little time left. Again down to poor planning.